Health care ratings
Health care ratings are ratings or evaluations of health care.
Technological advances played a key role in facilitating the data collection and number crunching needed to generate health care ratings.
Health care ratings are coming of age in a time of rising levels of consumer health literacy. Surveys consistently show that consumers rely heavily on friends and family when making healthcare decisions. With social networking and global connectivity, some of these family and friend referrals will include a wider network and will increasingly rely on quality data retrieved from multiple sources. Government, non-profit and private organizations are building public-private collaborations focused on the development of a nationwide system in the United States.
Quality measures are standards that are used to assess the various aspects of the healthcare system. Using the Donabidien framework, these measures evaluate process of care, healthcare structures and/or outcomes of a healthcare services. This information is translated into report cards that are generated by quality organizations, nonprofit,consumer groups and media. This evaluation of quality is based on:
Measures of Hospital quality
Measures of Health Plan Quality
Measures of Physician Quality
Measures of Quality for Other Health Professionals
Measures of Patient Experience
Measures are collected and disseminated by a number of quality reporting organizations.
Consumer Assessment of Health Professionals and Systems(CAHPS)
The National Quality Forum (NQF)
National Quality Measures Clearinghouse
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the largest philanthropy in the United States dedicated to improving health and health care, provides support for multiple efforts dedicated to increasing public awareness of the performance of health professionals:
Organizations are sensitive to public reporting As the healthcare system moves from supply driven to demand driven, transparency of such quality reporting is important for informed decision making and efficiency improvements
A 2001 retrospective cohort study found that health plans voluntarily generating public reports had higher quality ratings than those that chose not to publicly report. Another retrospective study of HMO’s yielded similar results, revealing that HMOs with lower quality scores were more likely to stop public reporting while higher performing HMOs continued to publicly report. Analysis of hospital performance reporting and consumer selection found mixed results about public perception and market share. A 1997 study “reported that releasing hospital-specific mortality rates was associated with small but statistically significant effects on utilization, whereas press reports of single, unexpected deaths were associated with a relatively large effect.”
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